In many towns, demand is up markedly at food pantries and for emergency assistance. “I’ve never seen like what I’ve seen in the last few months,” said Stephen Smith-Cobbs, pastor of Trinity Church in Herndon, Va. “Everyone’s having to tighten their belts. Everyone’s trying to make do with less.”
Some congregations have delayed capital campaigns out of sensitivity to the difficulty of the times. They’ve seen church members struggle with the pain of losing jobs or having their hours and pay cut back; prayed for those worrying about bills they can’t pay or even the prospect of bankruptcy or foreclosure.
Some pastors are concerned that elderly church members, their life savings dwindling away, will suffer silently and won’t ask for help. In some communities, for example, assisted living facilities find that people who want to move in can’t, because they can’t find buyers for their homes. So people hunker down, trying to tough it out even as they become more frail and in need more assistance.
“Are the elderly the new vulnerable?” asked Mike Huentelman McCormick, director of urban ministries at University Church in Seattle.
“Our fear is that they won’t come forward and share what their need is, and they’ll just stop attending church. So one of the questions we’re asking is, `How do we identify and check in with folks (who might need help), and establish a network of care?’ ”
For many people, asking for assistance is a blow to their pride. “It’s kind of uncharted territory, especially if you had planned on making it” on your savings and investments, McCormick said. “You were diligent and you put savings away, and now you’re dealing with a new reality.”
This is, for pretty much the whole country, for everyone from college students to retirees, a time of changing financial realities.
The community of Salinas in California, for example, has been hard-hit by the economic downturn.
“It’s very hard,” said Mike Ladra, pastor of First Church in Salinas. “In all my years of ministry, I’ve never seen economics this hard. Our area had a big housing bubble, so houses right now have dropped 30, 40 percent. A lot of people were caught in the mortgage deal where they borrowed on a line of credit on their house. A lot of people in this area are walking away from their homes. It has hit just about everybody.”
Congregations are trying to find new ways to respond, through preaching and ministry, to demonstrate God’s presence at a time when many Americans feel vulnerable and afraid.
As Christians, “we’re all called to share our blessings and to provide comfort and hope and love and to offer prayers, but at the same time to reach out in tangible ways,” said Smith-Cobbs. “We’re trying hard to be the body of Christ in a hurting world, and to share the good news.”
Stewardship
Congregations are not immune from the financial pressures either: many are noticing the hard times in declining giving in the weekly collection plate and in the faltering health of their own endowments. As they wrap up their fall stewardship campaigns, pastors say they can see the recession having an impact. Some members don’t know what to pledge or are pulling back, unsure of whether they will have a job. The budgets of some congregations are starting to run behind.
In Salinas, congregational leaders postponed taking an offering in October to support a $10 million capital project to build a family life center.
Riviera Church in Key Biscayne, Fla., is in the midst of a $1.2 million renovation – in part to repair hurricane damage and to make the facility safer for future storms. A small capital campaign, to cover the last $50,000 to $60,000 of the costs, is “going very slowly,” said Laurie Kraus, the congregation’s pastor.
One church member in the banking industry lost a job after more than 20 years of service. A man in the advertising business saw his entire department shut down around him.
Some “are reducing their pledges if they have to,” Kraus said. “They’re afraid they won’t have enough to live on.”
Others are maintaining the levels of their pledges – but say they’re not sure whether the money will be there in the end.
And Kraus has been looking for opportunities to acknowledge publicly the losses of jobs and the pain that brings.
“The first couple of people who lost jobs were sort of ashamed and didn’t want to talk about it,” she said. But now people are mentioning people who’ve been laid off or businesses that are in trouble during the prayers of the people. An Advent booklet offering stories of faith from the congregation includes some related to economic hard times. And on the first Sunday in December, the liturgy included an anointing with oil for wholeness and prayer “for courage and for clarity and wisdom in the midst of the economic circumstances,” Kraus said.
Some Presbyterians are calling for congregations to become more intentional in their response to the difficult economy.
Bruce Reyes-Chow, moderator of the 218th General Assembly, put out a call through his blog asking people to share stories of how their congregations have been responding. The person who suggested the question to Reyes-Chow, L. J. Show https://presbyteriangal.blogspot.com/ of Glendale, Calif., wrote, “I would hope that missional focus might make some U-turns to watch these things and then respond with action. All I see in churches where I live is business as usual.”
But some Christians are taking the initiative to do more.
In Seattle, a nonprofit Christian group called Mustard Seed Associates https://www.msainfo.org/about/ organized a “Recession Preparedness Brainstorming Session” in September, building on the idea that many congregations have become involved in preparedness and response for natural disasters, and trying to shift that model into preparing for economic hard times.
The participants were asked to concentrate on three main areas: the urban poor, the middle class, and church communities. According to the Mustard Seed Web site, they asked questions such as, “What would happen if 10 percent of the people in your community and church lost their jobs and inflation continued to grow?” or “What would happen if the organizations who serve the poor suddenly saw their resources evaporate while the needs of the local and global poor soar?”
The idea was “how can we work together as the body of Christ,” on an issue that’s affecting not just one area, such as when Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, but the whole country, said McCormick, who participated in the event.
He cited Scripture passages showing God, in times of famine or need, “seems to show up is in the places of the margins. It’s the example of the outsider, the widow, the leper … stories that point to God’s abundance. I take that as encouragement …to look to the margins as places where God is speaking and offering insight into his provision and his redemptive work. Also in a sense, as we reconnect and find community as a church through this time, I think that will be a source of rich blessing for us. … sort of the gift of the time, is unity for the church.”
Preaching
All this uncertainty has led some pastors, as with McCormick, straight to the Bible. They’re preaching and blogging and sending out the word that in times of uncertainty, God is present. And they’re reminding folks that affluence, money, and possessions never made a particularly solid foundation to start with.
Early on, when the stock market took its first big plunge, Kraus was getting ready to preach from Exodus — the story of the golden calf.
“The whole idea is that we give our allegiance to something we can see, that makes us feel secure, that’s rooted in economic security we know already is not true,” she said. “But we’ve been fortunate enough not to be tested on it for a very long time, most of us. We’ve been very lucky. Now we have an opportunity to put into practice where our allegiance really is, and to live in generosity in relation to people who are much more desperate than we are.”
Ladra, in California, has preached a stewardship series called “How to be Happy in Hard Times.”
He’s spoken about gratitude and contentment, and about “giving back to God as part of expressing your thanksgiving.”
Part of the message: “Gratitude has to do with getting out of comparing yourself to other people,” Ladra said. “Thankfulness is the willingness to let others have more than you have. … Want what you have, be grateful for all the things money can’t buy that are just gifts, like your health, like the luck of the womb — being born in America. … If you’re born in America,” he said, “you have opportunities.”
At Trinity Church in northern Virginia, the Longest Night service this year fell on Dec. 21, which happened to be a Sunday. Smith-Cobbs planned to preach about God providing light in the darkness, and about how “it’s the long night of the soul for folks who aren’t sure if their jobs will be there, if their companies will shut down.”
And in Champaign, Ill., First Church emphasized caring for the hungry and the poor around all through Advent.
“It’s the poor who have been hit the hardest,” said Chuck Carlson, associate pastor for pastoral care and evangelism. “Food banks are running out of food, clothing banks are running out of clothes. There’s a real desperate cry for help.”
He sees this time of increased need as a chance for Christians to reassess their priorities, to step back from the shiny toys of consumer affluence and to rediscover the ideas of relationship and sharing what God has provided.
“I see it as a real opportunity for the church to be the church again — and perhaps to grow and become what God has called us to be,” Carlson said.
“Often times I think we get distracted by the wrong things. We’ve become so affluent. … But all of a sudden Jesus becomes real in the face of the poor and the hurting. We get back to basics. This is really about taking care of each other.”
